We haven’t talked about the Printing Bucket for a while—so during these lazy days of summer, here’s a fun reference book by O’Toole that will position you as the premier quotemeister at staff meetings.

POP QUIZ! Did the following people originate these quotations?(True, False, or Recycled? Answers below.)

1) Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”2) Woody Allen: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”3) Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”4) Edmund Burke:“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”5) Thomas Edison: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”6) Bill Gates: “640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anyone.”7) Chief Seattle: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”8) Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”9) Mother Teresa: “’Do good anyway’ and the Paradoxical Commandments.”10) U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes on the invention of the telephone: “Great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”11) Benjamin Disraeli: “Half of the town councilors are not fools.”12) David Foster Wallace: “You’ll worry less about what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”13) John Wooden: “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”14) Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted.”15) John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and Woodrow Wilson: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”16) Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Easy reading is hard writing.”17) Yogi Berra: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”18) Mark Twain: “If your own tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”19) Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Proverbs 17:28: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”20) Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

In researching the quotation attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: “Half of the town councilors are not fools,” O’Toole devotes six pages (including notes) and concludes that the earliest reference was in 1927 in Sweden, and not from London and Prime Minister Disraeli. The 1927 quotation:

“A government official reportedly lost his temper and rebuked his fellows. A municipal councilor . . . remarked that certainly half of his colleagues were fools. An apology was demanded. He promised to make reparation and caused bills with the following correction to be posted on boardings in the town: ‘I said that half of the town councilors are fools. I now declare that half of the town councilors are not fools.’”

According to O’Toole, “Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and Yogi Berra are quotation superstars. Personas of this type are so vibrant and attractive that they become hosts for quotations they never uttered.”

So…what’s your favorite quotation—and have you verified its accuracy? As Abraham Lincoln noted, “Not everything you read on the internet is true.”

POP QUIZ ANSWERS: Quotations 1 and 2 are true. All others are false, except O’Toole says 12 and 15 are “recycled.” And here’s an interesting note (at least to me): Quotation 12 notes that Ethel Barrett should also get some credit for this recycled quotation. It appeared in her 1968 book, Don’t Look Now, but Your Personality Is Showing (5th printing), published by G/L Regal Books—also the publisher of my book, Mastering the Management Buckets (now distributed by Baker Books).

The Printing Bucket chapter in Mastering the Management Buckets will remind you that if the written emergency instructions on a Boeing 747 are laced with typographical errors, it may cause passengers to wonder, “If the proofreading is shoddy—what about the safety precautions?”

BOB KELLY: 2 MILLION QUOTES! Need the perfect quotations for your presentations, inspiring talks, PowerPoints, articles, or full-length books? Contact Bob Kelly, Resident Wordsmith at WordCrafters, Inc. His quote collection now comprises 585 published volumes and close to two million selections. (Honest!) Bob will also help you with your writing projects. Visit his website here.

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